Budgie reaches forward and fiddles with the radio dials. The car, a nifty new Ford V-8, has been equipped with every convenience by her doting father and presented to her a month ago as an early graduation present. Nine months early, to be exact, because he, in his trust and blindness, wants her to make use of it during her last year at Smith.
You should get out and have some fun, buttercup, he told her, beaming. You college girls study too hard. All work and no play.
He dangled the keys before her.
Are you sure, Daddy? Budgie asked, eyes huge and round, like Betty Boop’s.
No, really. It’s the truth; I was standing right there. We’ve been friends since we were born, only two months apart, she at the beginning of summer and me at the end. Our families summer together at the same spot in Rhode Island, and have done so for generations. She’s dragged me along with her this morning on the basis of that friendship, that ancient tie, though we don’t really run in the same circles at college, and though she knows I have no interest in football.
The Ford makes a throaty roar as she accelerates into a curve, swallowing the scratchy voices from the radio. I grasp the door handle with one hand and the seat with another.
Budgie laughs again. “Come on, honey. I don’t want to miss the warm-ups. The boys get so serious once the game starts.”
Or something like that. The wind carries away two words out of three. I look out the side and watch the leaves hurry by, the height of the season, while Budgie chatters on about boys and football.
As it turns out, we have missed the warm-ups, and most of the first quarter as well. The streets of Hanover are empty, the stadium entrance nearly deserted. A distant roar spills over the brick walls, atop the muffled notes of a brass band. Budgie pulls the car up front, on a grassy verge next to a sign that says NO PARKING, and I struggle with my hat and pins.
“Here, let me do it.” She takes the pins from my cold fingers, sticks them ruthlessly into my hat, and turns me around. “There! You’re so pretty, Lily. You know that, don’t you? I don’t know why the boys don’t notice. Look, your cheeks are so pink. Aren’t you glad we had the top down?”
I fill my lungs with the clean golden-leaf New Hampshire air and tell her yes, I’m glad we had the top down.
Inside, the stands are packed, pouring over with people, like a concrete bowl with too much punch. I pause at the burst of noise and color as we emerge into the open, into the sudden deluge of humanity, but there’s no hesitation in Budgie. She slings her arm around mine and drags me down the steps, across several rows, stepping over outstretched legs and leather shoes and peanut shells, excusing herself merrily. She knows exactly where she’s going, as always. She grips my arm with a confident hand, tugging me in her wake, until a shouted Budgie! Budgie Byrne! wafts over the infinite mass of checked caps and cloche hats. Budgie stops, angles her body just so, and raises her other arm in a dainty wave.
I don’t know these friends of hers. Dartmouth boys, I suppose, familiar to Budgie through some social channel or another. They aren’t paying much attention to the game. They are festive, laughing, rowdy, throwing nuts at one another and climbing over the rows. In 1931, two years after the stock crash, we are still merry. Panics happen, companies fail, but it’s only a bump in the road, a temporary thing. The great engine coughs, it sputters, but it doesn’t die. It will start roaring again soon.
In 1931, we have no idea at all what lies ahead.
They are boys, mostly. Budgie knows a lot of boys. A few of them have their girls nestled next to them, local girls and visiting girls, and these girls all cast looks of instinctive suspicion at Budgie. They take in her snug dark green sweater, with its conspicuous letter D on the left breast, and her shining dark hair, and her Betty Boop face. They don’t pay my pretty pink cheeks much attention at all.
“What’d I miss? How’s he doing?” she demands, settling herself on the bench. Her eyes scan the field for her current boyfriend—the reason for our breakneck morning drive from Massachusetts—who plays back for Dartmouth. She met him over the summer, when he was staying with friends of ours at Seaview, as if Hollywood central casting had ordered her up the perfect costar, his eyes a complementary shade of summertime blue to her winter ice. Graham Pendleton is tall, athletic, charming, glamorously handsome. He excels at all sports, even the ones he hasn’t tried. I like him; you can’t help but like Graham. He reminds me of a golden retriever, and who doesn’t love a golden retriever?
“He’s all right, I guess,” says one of the boys. He seats himself on the bench next to Budgie, so close his leg touches hers, and offers her a square of Hershey. “Decent run in the last series. Eleven yards.”
Budgie sucks the chocolate into her mouth and pats the narrow space on her other side. “Sit next to me, Lily. I want you to see this. Look down at the field.” She points. “There he is. Number twenty-two. Do you see him? On the sidelines, near the bench. He’s standing, talking to Nick Greenwald.”
I look down at the near sideline. We’re closer to the field than I thought, perhaps ten rows up, and my vision swarms with Dartmouth jerseys. I find the number 22 painted in stark white on a broad forest-green back. Strange, to see Graham in a sober football uniform instead of a bathing costume or tennis whites or a neat flannel suit and straw boater. He’s deep in conversation with number 9, who stands at his right, half a head taller. Their battered leather helmets are tucked under their arms, and their hair is the same shade of indeterminate brown, damp and sticky with sweat: one curly, one straight.
“Isn’t he handsome?” Budgie’s shoulders sink under a dreamy sigh.
Number 9, the taller one, the curly-haired one, looks up at that exact instant, as if he’s heard her words. The two of them are perhaps fifty yards away, and the bright autumn sun strikes their heads in a wash of clear gold.
Nick Greenwald, I repeat in my head. Where have I heard that name before?
His face is hard, etched from the same brickwork as the stadium itself, and his eyes are narrowed and sharp, overhung by a pair of fiercely gathered eyebrows. There is something so intense, so fulminant, about his expression, like a man from another age.
A vibration crackles up my spine, a charge of electricity.
“Yes,” I say. “Very handsome.”
“His eyes are so blue, almost like mine. He’s such a darling. Remember how he chased my hat into the water last summer, Lily?”
“Who’s that one? The one he’s talking to?”
“Oh, Nick? Just the quarterback.”
“What’s a quarterback?”
“Nothing, really. Stands there and hands the ball to Graham. Graham’s the star. He’s scored eight touchdowns this year. He can run through anybody.” Graham looks up, following Nick’s gaze, and Budgie stands up and waves her arm.
Neither responds. Graham turns to Nick and says something. Nick is carrying a football, tossing it absently from one enormous hand to the other.
“I guess they’re looking somewhere else,” says Budgie, and she sits down, frowning. She taps her fingers against her knee and leans close to the boy next to her. “You couldn’t be a darling and spare a girl another nibble, could you?”
“Have as much as you like,” he says, and holds out the Hershey bar to her. She breaks off a square with her long fingers.
“Are they friends?” I ask.
“Who? Nick and Graham? I guess. Good friends. They room together, I think.” She stops and turns to me. Her breath is sweet from the chocolate, almost syrupy. “Why, Lily! What are you thinking, you sly thing?”
“Nothing. Just curious.”
Her hand covers her mouth. “Nick? Nick Greenwald ?